Amiri returned to Iran last July to much fanfare and welcoming as a hero who had been an Iranian spy inside America.
But after his welcoming ceremony, Amiri disappeared from view. He has not been seen or heard from since.
An unconfirmed report now says Amiri was soon jailed and tortured, presumably to find out what he told the Americans, and has now been put on trial.
IranBriefing.net—run by a US-based opposition group that normally reports on human rights, political prisoners and the activities of the Pasdaran—said Amiri had been interrogated intensively for three months in Tehran before spending two months in solitary confinement, where his treatment left him hospitalized for a week.
It said that family members reported they had been able to visit Amiri twice during his incarceration. No source other than the family was given in the article.
IranBriefing earlier said Amiri’s family members had been stripped of their passports and placed under close scrutiny when the scientist disappeared in 2009. The regime claimed he had been kidnaped, but if his family’s passports were seized, that suggests the regime believed he had defected.
IranBriefing said Amiri was put on trial in March before a military tribunal. It did not say why the trial was in a military court when Amiri was not part of a uniformed service. It said Amiri had been detained the past five months in Heshmatiyeh Prison, the military detention site in Tehran, after having been kept in a house for questioning previously. Such houses are a common use by the security forces.
It said Amiri was charged with communicating with a hostile country and providing classified information to an enemy.
The Iran Times has received no other reports about Amiri since his return home. It has no information to verify or refute the IranBriefing report.
If Amiri has indeed been put on trial, however, it makes mincemeat of the official Iranian line that Amiri was an Iranian spy in the United States.
Amiri disappeared in 2009 while on the hajj to Saudi Arabia. It appears he made contact there with the Americans and was flown to the United States—although Iran charges the Americans kidnapped him.
In the last several weeks of his time in the US, Amiri made three videos posted on YouTube—one saying he had decided to continue his studies in the US, another saying he was being held captive and a third claiming he was on the run from the CIA.
After being debriefed by US intelligence, Amiri was sent off to a university in Arizona. He seems to have developed doubts about his defection there and eventually decided he wished to return. The CIA then escorted Amiri to the Iranian interests section in Washington and he flew home shortly thereafter.
In Iran, he was feted—for one day. The government said he had become an Iranian spy in the United States after being kidnaped and had given Iran much usual information, though the only information it publicly described was the Virginia license plate numbers of two cars used by the CIA.
The official line said Amiri had escaped the clutches of the CIA and made it on his own to the Iranian diplomatic mission in Washington. But the regime never explained why the US authorities then allowed him to fly out of the United States.
Many people have speculated that Amiri could have taken useful information back to Iran. But defectors are always treated as questionable characters. They are not taken to CIA headquarters and only get to know a handful of CIA officials who debrief them. The debriefers know to extract information, not to give information. That suspicion is ingrained because defectors are free to go and have on more than one occasion before Amiri gotten homesick and headed home. There is also always the consideration that a defector may be a plant, sent not to spy on the United States but to give false information designed to confuse the CIA and distract it.